1776 and All That

IRVINGTON‐ON‐PIUDSON, N. Y. —“There are those who say,” observed President Nixon in his 1972 State of the Union message, “that the old spirit of ‘76 is dead. Those who say this do not know America.”

The Spirit of ‘76 is not dead, but discarded. It was mugged along the highway Of our 196‐year history by Mr. Nixon and most of his predecessors in this century with the help of liberal intellectual and moral leaders. The treason and betrayal of the Revolution of 1776 is complete when an American President invokes the Spirit of ‘76 while promoting big bureaucratic government at home and entangling, alliances abroad.

The false pride of American foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson has. created the illusion that America has had a moral mandate to remake the world or save it from its folly and foolishness. Washington warned us against such a policy with his famous admonition to future Presidents to “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and through prudent strong military preparedness “maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve the peace.”

Because we have abandoned this intellectual and philosophical legacy of Washington and the American Revolution, succeeding Presidents have tasted the, bitter herb of betrayal and defeat in a procession of intetnational conferences and summits.

The common illusion that American Presidents and world leaders carried to these conferences was the belief that words would suffice for deeds and that the fabric of peace and international friendship could be woven at the same loom with dictatorships and authoritarian governments. At the root of such delusive thinking of American Presidents in particular was, and still is, a soft pragmatism and expediency that blinded each to the necessity of serving the larger philosophical principles on which Washington first anchored American foreign policy.

President Nixon believes that by his Peking‐Moscow trips he is doing his duty in the interest of “a full generation of peace.” However, the premises of his diplomacy are precisely those followed by his predecessors, all of which led to failure. Mr. Nixon claims he undertakes the trips with no illusions, while nevertheless fostering the illusion that two totalitarian Communist dictatorships (which have had a powerful hand in breaking the peace world wide) are now prepared “to live together [with us] on the same planet despite our differences.” It is precisely these differences that make any genuine peace impossible.

A deeper difference is philosophical Mr. Nixon will be talking to men who have a consistent totalitarian philosophical view of the world forged out of the fiery crucible of violent revolution. Mr. Nixon has no consistent view as head of a nation which was first born out of revolution, but whose larger principles—both at home and abroad— have been abandoned for pragmatic political necessity. In particular, Mao and Chou head a natiqn that knows where it is going, whereis Mr. Nixon heads a country that doesn't because it has broken from its philosophical beginnings.

It is revealing that the Chinese have commented on the fact that Mr. Nixon hungers for the honor of being President in 1976 during the 200th anniversary of American independence (if he is reelected in 1972). Combined with their personal revilement of the President, it is ‘Clear that they regard his visit not as the President of a powerful nation that produced a Washington and a Jefferson, but of a country that has produced a latter‐day Neville Chamberlain.

Mr. Nixon flew to Peking in a Presidential jet named “Spirit of ‘IV and landed the day before the birthday of George Washington. One only wished that the wisdom of Washington and the principles of the American Morolution of 1776 had gone with him. The President would. then be really leading from strength and not weakness.

Jeffrey St. John is a writer and radle commentator.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.